Inyoni cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, looking around her, “given that the goddess of crocodiles has no interest in tales of our (admittedly impressive) sexual escapades, I think I’ll tell you a different sort of story.
“When I was little more than an adolescent, my dad came back from a viking. Not an unusual occurrence, of course, but this time he came back… changed somehow.” She paused here for dramatic effect (and perhaps laid it on a tad thick).
“Now, no one could quite figure out just what was wrong at first. It was like a sort of heaviness hung about him. Then, he fell ill. The healers said this sickness was in his lungs. He had these loud, wet coughs. It was like he was drowning on the inside.
“But nothing the healers did— and they did a lot—helped.”
She narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. “It was at this point that we began to consider the possibility that he had been cursed.
“This was clearly powerful magic, so my mother went to get a priestess while the rest of us looked after Dad. I had just stepped out to get ice when, pacing just a ways from our den, there was a big, black wild dog. Normally a wild dog wouldn’t be anything to get worked up about, but this wild dog was massive. Even bigger than you!” Inyoni directed this last part to the crocodile goddess, “And it had red eyes that glowed like the setting sun.
“Now, I wasn’t scared,” she explained, “but I was—” Inyoni hesitated as she searched for the right word. “Concerned,” she decided at last. “Because I knew what you’ve all probably guessed by now. That black dog was a Black Dog… and it had come for my dad!
“There was no way I was going to let that thing disgrace my father by giving him a death in bed, so I did the only thing I could do,” she paused here again and placed careful emphasis on her next words, “I attacked.
“The Black Dog hadn’t expected that! Even in our pride, as full as it is with the most worthy and valiant of lions, very few warriors would have been keen to pick a fight with a Black Dog unless they were sick or old and aiming to die. I’d wager that it had never had a fight with a young and healthy Stormborn in the whole length of its existence. So, of course, it simply wasn’t prepared for me.
“Now, a Black Dog isn’t exactly a slouch of a fighter— being a bringer of death and all— but I made short work of it. I was going to kill it and take its pelt for a trophy, but it begged me so pitifully to spare it… I kind of felt embarrassed for it, really, and its coat smelled of rotting things anyway. But, given the situation my dad was in, I couldn’t let it off the hook that easily.
“‘You came for Bassi of the Stormborn, didn’t you? Because there’s a curse on him?’ I asked the Black Dog. It said that, yeah, that was the gist of it. ’Course, I’d always been taught that Black Dogs have their own magic. So we made a deal: the Black Dog would remove the curse on my dad, and I wouldn’t turn it into a throw rug. It used a counter spell to nullify the curse and fled the pridelands with its tail between its legs.
“By the time I got back with the ice, Dad was already up and moving around our den. Within the week, he was well enough to go viking again.” Inyoni grinned. “The end.”
